Boris Johnson has compared the war between Ukraine and Russia with Brexit. Describing Russia's military intervention as in any way comparable with the entirely friendly relations between the EU and Britain is ridiculous and insulting, showing that he really has no grip of reality. However, there is one level on which what he says was correct. Both are driven by a reactionary nationalist fervour, and both are really about attempts by exploiting classes to protect their interests. Neither offer anything positive for workers who are exploited by those classes.
In Britain, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie or capitalist class, which is now a global class of owners of fictitious-capital, in the form of shares, bonds, property and their derivatives, had no interest in Brexit. It is a global class that can live anywhere and everywhere, and does, owning homes in most of the world's capital cities, and scenic locations, as well as luxury yachts that act as mobile homes. This global ruling class has no attachment to any particular state, and its wealth, in the form of fictitious capital, is entirely fungible and mobile. At the press of a button or phone call to a broker it can sell all of its German shares and bonds, and buy French, US, or Japanese assets instead.
This global ruling class is very progressive for this vey reason, because its interests, like those of the working class, reside in demolishing existing national borders, and nation states, and creating, at least large, multinational single markets and states, across which goods, capital and labour can move freely, if not a single global market and economy, where that would be true. So, like the working-class, the global ruling class had no interest in Brexit. Both the ruling class and the working class are global classes in themselves, and the former also for itself. Rather, in Britain, the drive for Brexit came from the petty-bourgeoisie, which is a national not a global class. That is all of those 5 million or so small businesses, and self-employed, whose conditions of life are generally even worse than those of the average skilled worker.
The petty-bourgeoisie can be summarised, in Britain as being "white van man". In France, they are the Gilets Jaunes, and in past times they were the subsistence peasants barely clinging to an existence, or people like the English hand loom weavers, who survived for years in misery, only due to the Poor Relief they obtained, as they could not compete with the new power looms introduced in the factories. They are people who exploit their own and family labour, with their own dwarf capitals. They are inefficient, because of those small capitals, compared to large-scale industry, and, to the extent they survive, its on the same kind of basis as did businesses in the early days of industrial capitalism, by cheating, cutting corners, paying low wages to any wage labourers and so on.
For this class of exploiters, whose horizons rarely rise above that of the local skyline, the EU represented only additional competition, and additional rules and regulations that made it harder for them to pay lower wages, and give lower conditions. That is why, those that owned these small businesses, and their families, together amounting to around the 15 million people that form the core vote of the Tory Party, and from which is drawn its core membership, voted for Brexit. It was petty nationalism driven by the material interest of a class that sought to have the protection of the British state to continue to exploit British workers unhindered.
But, in Ukraine, the war being fought against Russia is not just the project of the Ukrainian petty-bourgeoisie, as was the case with Brexit in Britain. The war is the project of the Ukrainian state, and so of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie itself, i.e. its ruling class. Indeed, not just of the Ukrainian ruling class, but of that class as an integral element of the global ruling class, which is why it has the full backing of NATO imperialism. The war is really about the conditions under which that global ruling class continues to exploit the workers of the world, and how the spoils of that exploitation is divided up between them. That is what all imperialist wars are really all about. That is why, as with Brexit, workers have no interest in such wars, which only determine who gets to exploit them, and how. What workers are really interested in is ending the exploitation altogether.
With Brexit, as I wrote at the time, British workers really had no interest in voting for a continuation of the EU, on its existing basis, still less the basis upon which Cameron was proposing, which would have been the worst of all worlds, continuing to subject them to the market, whilst denying them the benefit of markets, in the form of free movement to be able to sell their labour-power where they could get the highest price for it. The only reason for workers to oppose Brexit, and vote Remain, was on the basis of a struggle with their fellow workers in Europe to go beyond its present capitalist limitations, to the creation of a Workers Europe, and a Socialist United States of Europe.
Workers in Ukraine have no reason to support their corrupt government, whose members have billions stashed in offshore bank accounts, and which is as beholden to Ukrainian billionaire oligarchs as Putin's kleptocratic government is beholden to Russian billionaire oligarchs. Given that the Ukrainian state has even taken into its ranks the organised forces of the Nazis of the Azov Battalion, which it is now training and arming with the latest NATO weaponry, and that the forces of the global far right, are using the war in Ukraine for training purposes, sending thousands of NAZI mercenaries to fight alongside the Azov Battalion, in the same way that jihadists went to fight in Iraq, Syria and Libya, the Ukrainian workers certainly have no reason to ally themselves with it.
That, of course, gives them no reason to ally with Putin either, whose regime has been one of the prime movers in promoting all of the petty-bourgeois nationalist movements, and far right insurgencies across the globe, including its support for Brexit, for Trump, Wilders, le Pen and so on. The Ukrainian workers do not have to choose between Zelensky and Putin, but can instead choose to oppose both, and to ally themselves with the Russian workers, who are also the victims of Putin.
There is another connection to Brexit, and its this. Putin, and his regime was one of the promoters and financiers of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist insurgencies such as for Brexit, and for Trump. The reason for that is simple. Whilst the global ruling class would like, in the best of all possible worlds, for there to be a single global market, with a single world capitalist state presiding over it, it knows that currently that is not possible. In the US, it took a bloody civil war to bring it about in place of the independence of the states, in Western Europe, it took a series of wars in the 19th century, and a prolonged European War 1914-18:1939-45, to try to bring it about, eventually being achieved peaceably in the creation of the EU. But, as these examples show, its always the case that separate national capitals try to gain the upper hand in any such process, leading to wars between them, as they try to do so.
As with families who have internal disputes, or criminal gangs that fight over the spoils, or just with businesses that compete against each other for who gets the biggest share of the profits, whilst being united in opposing the workers getting a bigger share, its all about a squabble amongst different sections of the global ruling class, primarily the US cousins squabbling with the Russian and Chinese cousins, with the European cousins being caught in the middle.
The US and European cousins had much of the pie sown up between them, but in recent times the Chinese cousins have been getting larger spoonful's of it, and the Russian cousins also got fed up of being pushed around, and wanted some of the action. Putin saw the EU as a strategic threat, especially given its continued links with the US, and so wanted Brexit, to break up the EU, and increase Russia's influence in Europe. That is why he put resources into backing the Brexit campaign, making links with UKIP, and with the Tory Right. It meant the Russian branch of the global ruling class, allying itself not with the rest of the ruling class, but with national sections of the petty-bourgeoisie. Its a mirror image of what sections of the petty-bourgeois, “anti-imperialist” left has done, in the past, in allying themselves with various reactionary petty-bourgeois, nationalist movements. Its why, sections of that petty-bourgeois Left found it so easy to join in Red-Brown fronts emerging out of the Brexit/Lexit movements.
But, all of that is against the long-term interests of the global ruling class, particularly the dominant wings of that global ruling class, in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Its why they opposed Brexit, and opposed Trump. For all of Paul Mason's nonsense, the US state was never going to allow the fascists standing behind Trump to carry through a coup, and were always going to begin washing them up, in the months that followed. And, as I wrote at the time, it would not stop there. They would inevitably follow through the links from organisations like Breitbart, and Cambridge Analytica etc. to the source of the money and so on, in Moscow, and back out from there, to the Brexit campaign, to the Tory Right, and their Western European equivalents. The war in Ukraine is really just a part of that washing up process of the fascists. The fact that, there are open NAZIS fighting on the side of Ukraine does not change that.
What this most certainly is not about is any concern that NATO has with the independence or self-determination of Ukraine, and nor is it about some kind of moral crusade by NATO imperialism. NATO has no interest in the concept of national self-determination. It has infringed it, at will whenever it has wanted to with its invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and numerous other places over the decades. It looks favourably upon and shields Israel which came into existence only by removing the right to self-determination of Palestinians, and maintains that by massive military force against them. Nor is NATO imperialism interested in any kind of morality, or opposition to “fascism”. It is allied with some of the worst butchers imaginable across the globe, and has actively put in place its own dictators, after having invaded various countries, as for example, it did in Chile in 1973. That is not to mention all the ones it has installed by using covert methods rather than open invasions.
No what it is about is profits. It is about the conditions in the global economy that best enable them to be produced, and about who gets access to the biggest share of them. The dominant section of the global ruling class, for decades saw gradual progress towards its dream of a kind of super-imperialism, of a single world economy and global capitalist state. Whilst large single markets were created on each continent, EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, and so on, and new ones like ACFTA being created all the time, as with large monopolies, although these continental single markets were in competition with each other, they were the only rational basis upon which they could reach deals with each other. And, that also created the conditions for global rules of the game, enforced by global para state bodies such as WTO, IMF, World Bank and so on.
What Russia did was to upset the monopoly board, and it was supported by China, because as increasingly China had been able to gain an increasing proportion of the available global profits, even within the existing rules of the game, so the dominant sections of the ruling class, decided to change the rules to protect their interests. But, its not just in relation to Russia and China that this applies. In the same way that Britain went into long-term relative decline in the latter part of the 19th century, as the US, Germany and Japan rose, so now the US is in long-term relative decline, not only because of the rise of China, at the heart of a new Pacific hub, but also Latin America is on the rise, the Middle East, prior to 2011, was on a rapid rise, and becoming more entwined with the EU, and Africa is also on a rapid rise, similar to that of Asia in the 1980's. But, also, the EU, as it has integrated more, now begins to pose a greater global challenge to the US.
Ukraine is really just a pawn in this great global game. It is about the dominant sections of the global ruling class demanding that the old rules of the game, and the old division of the spoils from the exploitation of the global working-class be kept as they were, whilst Russia and China are saying they want a piece of that action for themselves, and a bigger say at the global tables that determine the rules and the allocation of the spoils. The global working-class, including, and especially the workers in Russia and Ukraine have no interest in those squabbles between our exploiters. Our interest is in opposing their wars, and ending their exploitation of us.
No War – The Main Enemy Is At Home – Workers of the World Unite – Turn the Guns on The Bosses
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